tech, food, nerd, rant, and other four-letter words

I just arrived at my hotel. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I’ve been offline for over 20 hours. Deep in the bottom of my bag lies an SMC “pocket” router about the size of two packs of smokes. I jack-in and power-up the router. I’m online. I leave my laptop on the desk downloading email while I crash on the bed with my Zaurus PDA; I start surfing for sushi.

Manhattan, NY, Present Day

I just arrived at my hotel. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I’ve been offline for over 20 minutes (as I approached the city my cab was actually outperforming my 3G data service). Deep in the bottom of my bag lies a TRENDnet “pocket” router about the size of a large matchbook. I jack-in and power-up the router. No link. WTF!

Farewell Ethernet

Worldwide, hotels are dumping their Ethernet ports and offering Wi-Fi only. Some have free Wi-Fi, most don’t. Some assign you an account that can be used with multiple devices, again, most don’t. Most hotels worldwide charge a fee per Wi-Fi device per day.

So far, I’ve been lucky. When I get screwed out of an Ethernet jack for my router I transform my iPhone into a Wi-Fi hotspot and live on 3G. And in most cases that works well, except in midtown Manhattan, parts of San Francisco, and any place outside of the US where data roaming charges would cost more than my daughter’s education.

I’ll wager that other tech travelers have similar issues.

Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi routing

What we need is a Wi-Fi-to-Wi-Fi router. Fortunately, there is a hack for that. Simply connect to the hotel Wi-Fi with your laptop, then share your Internet connection with your Ethernet port (you are probably used to doing it the other way around, but it works both ways, at least with OS/X it does), then connect your router to your Ethernet port. Voilà!

OS/X Tips

For some reason that I am too tired to figure out at this time (I’m still in Manhattan), my OS/X NAT running on my MacBook Air is not providing an IP address via my USB Ethernet adapter to my TRENDnet router. The system log registers the DHCP DISCOVER and that’s it. I checked /etc/bootpd.plist and it looks OK to me. The quick fix was to use my iPad to connect to my router via Wi-Fi and change the WAN (Ethernet) port to “Static IP”. I used ifconfig to find the IP address of the Mac USB Ethernet interface and then added one to that for the router static IP, then I used the Mac USB Ethernet IP for the DNS and default gateway on the router. 30 seconds later all my gear was online.

End Note

This solution is not as ideal as a true Wi-Fi-to-Wi-Fi router, but at least my TRENDnet can be powered by USB so I can still use my laptop anywhere in the room (I just gaffer-taped my router to my MacBook Air lid. You should always travel with gaffers tape. Do NOT use duck tape on your precious Mac).

No option to change the browser user agent. If you get sent to a mobile version of a site just because you are on an iPad you cannot do anything about it.

No adjustable cache.

No offline mode.

Those are just a some examples of how crippled Safari is on the iPad. 90% of the time Safari is just fine, but it’s that last 10% that makes me email myself a link to remind me to open it up from my MacBook.

Hail iCab

I’ve resisted using other iPad browsers because I am lazy and do not want to manage yet-another-browser. However, iCab may change my mind.

iCab has cookie management. Like any desktop OS full featured browser, you can manage your cookies.

iCab has a private mode. Handy for not leaving a trace.

iCab can present itself as any popular browser. This mostly why I use it. A use case: Last December Google thought it’d be annoying and give free WiFi to every Delta passenger throughout the holiday season. The problem is, that everybody used it, and therefore nobody could use it. You’d get stupid messages from the Google hosted Gogo Inflight like, “just like the busy holiday season, the Internet is busy.” I actually had to get work done! The only purchase option was a monthly pass. I was more than willing to pay for a one-time connection just like I normally do, but that was not an option. Fortunately, I could use my iPhone. I guess Gogo and Google decided that mobile traffic would be OK and only throttled non-mobile traffic. So I switched from my MacBook to my iPad, it’s mobile, right? Wrong! Fortunately I had an alternative browser that allowed me to change my User Agent to iPhone and voilà! I was online. Same trick for for my MacBook after putting Safari in Developer Mode.

iCab has a user definable cache size. I really tire with Safari slowly reloading a large page when I back arrow.

iCab has an offline mode. This is a bit more convenient than remembering to load up content in Instapaper or other offline readers.

Well, Pi Day has come and gone, so what’s left for a Pi nerd to look forward to? Tau Day? Heresy! That other Pi Day, July 22nd (22/7)? Pa-lease. Accept the fact that it’s OK to talk about Pi when it’s not Pi Day? Sure, why not?

A random thought caught my attention after I posted my article Pi Day Rematch: Apple II vs. HP-41C that suggested that I could have been more fair to the HP-41C by highlighting some of it’s obvious strengths, e.g. portability and energy efficiency. And, I got a lot of personal emails expressing that thought as well. (In my defense, it wasn’t I that compared the two in the first place–some people are just too serious :-).

Lets be honest, was there any doubt in anybody’s mind that a late ’70s pocket calculator could best an Apple II in a 1000 digit drag race? Or ENIAC for that matter? However, what if, you had to compute Pi within a fixed energy budget of 1 Wh or on a flight to Paris? Which would you choose?

Energy Efficiency

I remember a time when the energy utilization of home computing equipment was never given a second thought other than, “turn it off before you go to bed.” Fast-forward to today: Our consumer electronics have a plethora of energy saving options, e.g. my computer suspends when not in use, my external drives spin down when unused, my fridge has a vacation mode, all my LCD TVs have a green mode (my Sharp rates your energy efficiency with green leaves (0-5)), my electric utility company wants to control my air conditioner, etc… Today, energy utilization matters. So, lets pretend it mattered in 1980. You’ve got a 1 Wh budget to compute Pi to 1000 digits. What do you use, the Apple II or the HP-41C?

The community members of comp.sys.apple2 and MoHPC were kind enough to measure the power consumption of the Apple II and HP-41C and reported 24 Watts and 72 mW respectively.

The best Apple II and HP-41C times reported by my tests were 194 seconds and 08:21:57 (30,117 seconds) respectively making the energy used 24W*(194/3600) = 1.29 Wh and 0.072W*(30117/3600) = 0.60 Wh.

It should be obvious why. The Apple II, as a general-purpose computer, has a lot of unused powered components where as the HP-41C, while still a computer, is a limited-purpose device for specific computational tasks. To further handicap the Apple II, the Apple II has to convert from AC to DC. The drop in efficiency for retro tech could be as high as 50%. However, none of that takes away from the fact that for computational intensive tasks, at least those involving Pi, the HP-41C is more efficient.

The table below contains all the benchmarks that I ran with their estimated energy usage. The original Apple Pi uses more than 1000 times the energy of the HP-41C; a whopping 1KWh!

Platform

Code

Base

Time(s)

Watts

Wh

HP-41C

RPN

105

30117

0.072

0.60

Apple II

Assembly

10

194

24

1.29

Apple II

MAF

216

1496

24

9.97

Apple II

cc65 2.13

216

1514

24

10.09

Apple II

Aztec C

216

2180

24

14.53

Apple II

Integer BASIC

10

150410

24

1002.73

Portability

The HP-41C is a remarkable late-’70s gadget. It has a display, an alphanumeric keyboard, a file system, removable storage, expandable memory, and sports general purpose programmable I/O (via HP-IL); all the earmarks of a ’70s computer, and it fits in your pocket.

Lets say that you are traveling non-stop to Paris from my hometown, and in the 10-11 Hr journey you need to compute at least 704 digits of Pi so that you can personally confirm that the digits of Pi in the Palais de la Découverte “π Room”, that were originally incorrect until corrected in 1945, are actually correct[1, pp. 50].

No contest here. There isn’t a pocket-able Apple II product unless you count emulation on the iPhone/iPad. What you need is a very capable, energy efficient, pocket computer–the HP-41C. 704 digits in < 10-11 Hr? No problem, it'd take a little over 4 hours. You can use the rest of your time to compute e. Too bad there isn’t an “e room”, or is there?

The “π Room”

No, I didn’t compute Pi on my way to Paris, but just knowing that I could have with my 41CX in my pocket reassured me. :-)

All Pi nerds (make that all nerds) that find themselves in Paris should make the pilgrimage to Palais de la Découverte to visit the only “π Room” in existence (or so I have been able to find). This science museum is a short walk from the Eiffel Tower, so if you are willing to spend the time to see a marvel of French engineering, then you might as well go see the most fabulous piece of calculation ever performed[2, pp.406] by an Englishman.

William Shanks of England

William Shanks (1812 – 1882) was an amateur mathematician and IMHO is still the king of all Pi nerds. William Shanks computed Pi to 707 places over a 15+ year period with nothing but pen, paper, and his wits[2, pp. 305]. A stunning achievement and the last computation of its kind, however, there is an error, can you see it?

Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 21 (1873), 319.

An example of a mechanical desk calculator available in 1945

No? Don’t worry, nobody else did either until 72 years later when another Englishman, D. F. Ferguson, in 1945 using a mechanical desk calculator checked Shanks’ results and discovered that Shanks was only correct up to digit 527[2, pp. 592]. Fortunately (for Shanks), Shanks never knew of his error. He passed away with the belief that he had achieved the unachievable.

I looked out the window. It was Cookie Monster in his cherry red Isuzu Impulse (girl car :-). I grabbed my jacket off the kitchen table, flipped off the lights, and locked up behind me–it was going to be a long night.

We headed west, under the overpass, across the tracks, and through a maze of dimly lit streets to Scott’s house.

Scott, had a modem. Almost all my friends had some type of computer, but a modem and a phone line was elite (even if it was your dad’s modem).

We knocked. Scott answered, and led us to his dad’s den. Door closed, he produced a dot matrix printout with six integers; one per line. While his parents were at work and we were in high school preparing for college and an honest living, the apathetic Apple IIe quietly searched, for numbers. To the untrained eye they were just numbers, but for young pirates to be, they were free long distance.

Cookie knew things, and had a knack for finding things. From his jacket pocket Cookie produced a scrap of paper with a hand written number and a floppy disk. He took the con, inserted the floppy, and powered up the dormant IIe.

The green CRT glow, the stutter of the disk ][, all that was missing was the smell of ozone. Cookie’s slender fingers danced with the agility of an medieval organist; a console jockey with no equal, and in no time…

We were in! An ASCII Express warez hole. To call it a BBS would be a stretch since there were no bulletins. This Hawaiian-based AE had one purpose: the distribution of warez. And we found what we were looking for: Pitfall II.

Download started. ETA: 45 minutes.

Convenient stores weren’t conveniently located in the ’80s suburbs. But we had time to kill. It took us nearly 45 minutes to navigate east to 7-11 where we loaded up on sugar and caffeine. Big Gulps in hand, we entered the den, and powered on the CRT.

Download complete.

We had it. But I never booted it up, I didn’t care. This was more fun than any Apple II game could ever be. I was hooked. I had to get a modem. I had to get online. Did people even say that in ’84?

Late ’80s

I’m 21, in school, have an apartment, a girlfriend, and a full time job writing ERP/MRP code for a local manufacturing shop. I also have my own BBS, a WWIVnet node, and I agreed to foot the long distance bill (yes, I paid for it myself) to Michigan to bring a feed into my city for the other WWIVnet boards. It was fun while it lasted (about a year). However I actually spent more time not dialing into other BBSes, but into my local university and BBSes that specialized in gateways to The Internet.

Usenet had no equal. I remember when I got my employer its own UUCP feed. I rushed with excitement to the city county building to get my longitude and latitude so that I could complete the registration of my site. The BBS scene had become passé.

But there was something missing, and still missing today: a local, personal face-to-face community. BBS parties and BBQs were awesome, but the best was BBS vs. BBS volleyball. And my board kicked ass every time.

I’m not dead yet… I feel happy! Really, I’d like to go for a walk

Recently I completed watching the circa 2005, three-disc DVD set, BBS The Documentary, and I was surprised that some still carry the torch–flame on! :-) The BBS is not dead–yet.

This documentary will appeal to my generation, my culture, my nerddom, more than any other. The interviews provide firsthand anecdotal experiences and knowledge and they all convey dial-up nerddom very well from its start to its decline.

Google for BBS phone numbers and eventually you’ll find one, perhaps one that’s close to home. And BBS F2F communities still exist; some have grown into ISP communities.

Ok, I’m ready, lets do this BBS thing

You are going to need a few things:

A (locally preferred) BBS phone number

A modem (and perhaps a serial port)

An analog phone line

Terminal software

Most of us 40ish retro geeks, including myself, have moved on. I don’t have a modem or a local BBS number. However I do have an analog phone line because VOIP sucks–a rant for another time. And like billions others I also have a mobile phone that drops calls–I am keeping my analog phone line.

The good news is that you do not need any of the aforementioned to get your retro geek on. Many BBSes have converted from dial-up to telnet. And Age of Reason is one such board.

Age of Reason is a telnet accessible BBS that’s running on an Enhanced Apple IIe, using GBBS Pro as the host software. AoR also features the adventure game Land of Spur, as it was when last run on the Tacoma, WA BBS Dura Europos in the late 80′s. — Gene Buckle

Accessing a 25-year-old BBS with today’s technology

What would a 2400 BPS BBS look like on an Apple II and Apple IIe?

With a few fonts and setup you can come close to the ’80s experience without the actual ’80s tech. I am going illustrate this on my Mac, but something similar should work for Windoze and Linux.

First, you are going to need some fonts. Download PrintChar21.ttf and PRNumber3.ttf, open them up and install them–just double click and install from Font Book.

Next, launch Terminal, then navigate to Terminal/Preferences…, Settings, then + to add a setting. I’ve taking a few screen shots of my Apple II (40 characters/line) settings and posted below. You may want to create an Apple IIe (80 characters/line) setting as well.

Print Char 21 is an Apple II-esque 40 character/line font. However a keen observer will notice that it produces lowercase letters. A real Apple II was SHOUTING AT YOU ALL THE TIME or worse SHOUTING AT YOU.

The animation at the beginning of this post uses this font.

I opted for no scroll back, but it is not required.

After your Apple II and Apple IIe setups ares complete you will need to restart Terminal before your new settings will appear in the Shell/New Windows menu.

for 40 or 80 columns respectively. You could get fancy and add -e telnet destination and then add that to your X11 menu so that you can get your BBS on with minimal effort.

BBS: Get your retro on!

Open up a 40 or 80 column retro terminal and type: telnet aor.retroarchive.org, and you should see something like this:

And like all single line BBSes, you will get BUSY signals. Just keep trying. To exit telnet type ctrl-[, then ‘q’, then ‘return’.

BBS 2011

The BBS glory days may be over, but their legacy lives on in the form of forums, blogs (where you can still be your own sysop!), and chat rooms. The Internet didn’t create these things, they already existed.

Say you want to take a very long trip with just your 32GB iPad, and while traveling you would like to catch up on a lot of movies and TV shows, but your 32GB iPad can only hold about 30 hours of content. What can you do?

Fortunately you can store your extra content on USB flash drives and SD cards and load them up as needed. Do do this: create a DCIM directory on the root of your FAT-32 formatted flash device, then put your iOS compatible videos in that directory using the naming convention IMG_####.M4V, e.g. IMG_0001.M4V, IMG_0002.M4V, etc…

To load up your content: connect your media via the Camera Connection Kit, and import them via the Photos app. You will have to watch your imported videos from the Photos app as well–no problem.

Notes:

I tested a 32GB flash drive and a 2GB SD card, no problems.

Flash media should be formatted with FAT-32 if you want support for files > 1GB.

I have not tested iTunes DRM encoded files. I am going to guess that it does not work. Use this for ripped DVDs and TiVo shows.

You can reuse the IMG numbers on each flash device. E.g. each flash device can have a video named IMG_0001.M4V.